


It's Not Unusual

by vulcan_slash_robot



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Cat Crack, Crack, Established Relationship, M/M, Minor Character Death - Lamp, hi ferret, i assure you that their deaths were quick and noble, lamp murderers unite!, rated teen for the Bad Language Words, some birds were harmed in the making of this fic, suddenly cats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 10:21:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14809508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcan_slash_robot/pseuds/vulcan_slash_robot
Summary: Tony is seriously going to stop answering when Strange calls.A silly thing mainly about cats, idea partly courtesy of the Discord I hang out in. For my free square in Stony MCU Bingo.





	It's Not Unusual

**Author's Note:**

> Do note, this is technically set post-IW, but really in some sort of imaginary post-A4 world in which everything is fine and nothing that happened in IW actually mattered, so really the net effect is just that all of the characters know each other. No spoilers. 
> 
> Shoutouts and special thanks to Wynnesome for Cheer-reading and Athletiger for Beta!

“Tony? Tony! Stay with me, honey, I need you on your feet here.”

Tony blinked. Shook his head. Tried banging on the helmet a few times, until the HUD settled back into a readable array of information, arranged around the display of Steve’s worried face. Nodded, once, sharply.

“I fucking hate magic,” he announced, just to watch a tiny fraction of the tension ease out of Steve’s shoulders. “You go low, I’ll go high.”

The patented Captain Face flickered for a moment, cracked by a soft smile. “That’s not a  _plan_ , Tony, we’ve talked about this--”

But Tony was already gone, jetting straight up from behind their temporary cover, ready to draw fire.

“Hey assholes!” he called over the loudspeakers, taking a long, graceful, backward arc over the battlefield. “What’s the hubbub, huh? Durmstrang ten-year reunion prank?”

“Beauxbatons,” Natasha corrected over comms. “This is France. The French one was Beauxbatons.”

“Have you  _looked_ at these guys?” Tony countered, pointing out a particularly egregious set of robes by firing a repulsor at their owner. “These are absolutely Durmstrang graduates, I don’t care what country we’re in.”

“Less chatter, more putting a stop to this before they do any more damage to this World Heritage Site,” Steve suggested. 

“Pretty sure they call them ruins because they were already ruined before we got here, Cap,” Clint pointed out.

It was true: the site really wasn’t even all that impressive, mostly lumps and mounds and bits of what once might have been walls, but it was old and the locals were fond of it and some Durmstrang-y assholes had taken it over for rites that got Strange’s hackles up and now here they were. Because Stephen was  _busy_.

“Remind me to block Doctor Weird’s number when we get back,” Tony grumbled, rolling out of the way of another implausible bolt of sparkly bullshit. 

“I’ll put that on the to-do list,” Steve answered wryly, ignoring his own attempted chatter-control. “Right under--”

The world went suddenly very bright and very violet.

****

Tony spasmed.

He would’ve lurched upright, but every square inch of him was encountering resistance in the form of a dead suit. He could move it, without power, but not with just a what-the-fuck-where-am-I flinch. The knowledge that he was at least still suited up, whatever else had just happened, served to slow his pounding heart a little. 

“What the fuck?” he breathed, giving voice to his current opinion on life, “What happened? Anybody there? Comms on?”

No dice. Well. Odds of raising anyone from inside a dead suit were always low, anyway. Also, nobody had ripped his faceplate off yet. Either that had only been a momentary blackout (purpleout?), or the problem was bigger than him.

With enough force of will, Tony managed to lift one heavy, fumble-fingered hand enough to release the emergency latches on his helmet. The catches flipped back with little metallic pings, and fresh air flooded in. He shook off the cobwebs, blinking into the sudden sunlight and listening for signs of trouble.

It was worryingly quiet. 

He was lying at the end of a shallow, familiar-shaped furrow, the kind that immediately read to him these days as “whoops, undignified landing” but not the kind that read “shit I almost died, fill that in before Steve sees”. So that was something. But the sounds of battle were notably absent, and, unless he was much mistaken, the sun was perceptibly lower in the sky than it had been.

“Ollie ollie oxenfree?” he called out, experimentally. “C’mon kiddos, I’ve fallen and I can totally get up but I kind of don’t want to. Sound off! Cap? Clint? Nat? Sam? I’ll take Sam. I’d take Bucky, if he was here. Hello?”

No response. No sign of the enemy either, though.

Tony unfastened the rest of the crucial emergency latches and shimmied out of the suit. He was not  _helpless_ outside of his armor, thankyouverymuch, he’d be fine if there were stragglers, but climbing out of his main weapon in the middle of a live battlefield always made him a bit edgy. 

He stood in a half-crouch, creeping carefully around ruined walls toward where the enemy had been centered. Nobody there, either. He poked around a few more corners and niches, looking for anyone, anything, but all he found were scorch marks, spent arrows, and shield scars.

Eventually Tony gave up and climbed up on a relatively high wall for a better view. When he cleared the edge, he was greeted by a small grey cat, perched in the center of a pile of fabric. It stared at him, impassive. 

Tony cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t mind me, Nermal, just passing through,” he mumbled, dragging himself to his feet. He peered around at the battlefield. No sign of movement, but...

His heart clenched. 

There were Sam’s wings, sprawled in a little furrow of their own, with a scattering of other gear strewn behind them. 

Thor’s axe, stuck in the ground, his armor draped halfway over the handle.

Nat’s tac suit, crumpled into a neat pile with a handgun on top, tucked behind a well-placed wall.

Steve’s shield. Steve’s everything.

And on top of each pile, apparently unconcerned, a cat.

Tony looked down at his feet. What he’d at first disregarded as a pile of rags was in fact most definitely a suit of body armor, sans sleeves. There was a quiver of arrows half-buried under it, and a bow in the grass just on the far side of the wall. The little gray cat looked back up at him with a soft “mrrrp?” and got up to rub against his legs.

“Oh, hell no,” Tony rasped out, voice shaky. “This is way above my pay grade, and my pay grade is hard to beat.” He dug at the collar of his undersuit, dragging out the amulet-- _amulet_ even, Jesus, fuck magic--that Strange had asked them all to wear when they went on his errands. In case of  _holy shit_ , contact wizard. 

The little stone disc pulsed in his hand, and a voice echoed out of it.

“What, Stark. I’m busy.”

“So you’ve said. My team are all cats.”

“...what.”

“You fucking heard me, Dumbledore,” Tony took a steadying breath. “Some big bullshit went off and the bad guys are gone and my friends are meowing. The armor must have shielded me, but this? This is a you problem.”

There was a slight pause.

“Just to be clear, they’ve been fully transformed into house cats? No human features left, no intelligible speech?”

Tony leaned down and scratched Clint’s ears. Clint purred. “Yeah, no, if they can talk they’re keeping it to themselves. That is one hundred percent cat.”

Strange sighed. “Okay. I really am busy, I don’t say that lightly, but I should be able to fix this. Just gather them up and keep them safe for a few days.”

“Days?! Steph, no, hippogriff, you can’t do this, I’m in the French countryside with five small fluffy Avengers, you can’t leave me like this.”

No reply.

***

It took ages to round them all up, and multiple trips. Tony was gaining a new appreciation for the phrase "herding cats.”

Clint (a tiny, stout, round little thing with even-toned grey fur all over) was happy to weave around Tony's legs but adamantly refused to be picked up. After a few unsuccessful tries, Tony resorted to fishing an arrow out of the quiver--one of the trick ones that would release a net when fired, not a pointy one--and trailing the end across the stones to lure him along. Thankfully, Clint’s arrow obsession seemed to be strong enough even in this form that he hopped along faithfully after it all the way back to the quinjet, over a hundred yards away. Tony took more satisfaction in locking him into a storage compartment than was probably healthy. 

Hey, it was a good-sized compartment, and he’d thrown some blankets in, it was fine.

One down and four to go, Tony paused to update FRIDAY on the situation via the jet’s comlink, and place a few Amazon same-day-shipping orders that were going to confuse the hell out of whoever was at the compound today.

Clint had been first out of sheer proximity, but now Tony had his choice, and to the surprise of nobody ever, he made a beeline to the pile of red, white, and blue.  _Boyfriend material,_  Tony thought wryly of the uniform. Steve wasn’t in any state to respond to the joke at the moment, so he kept it to himself. Not like he hadn’t said it before anyway. Usually in reference to matching pajama pants, though.

Steve’s shield was face-down on the ground, and the shallow bowl it formed was filled halfway to the brim with orange and white fur, as if the cat had been poured in. Tony knelt down and cautiously poked at it. The cat’s head reared up at once, silent but clearly affronted. 

Tony had to bite his lip. Steve was mostly white all over, but the orange on top of his head...well, it was a cowl, basically. 

“Cap to the bone, huh?” Tony teased. Steve licked his own shoulder a few times and settled back in, twisting himself partly upside-down. Tony gasped softly. “Oh, I’m doomed, you’re too cute. You have to stop that, babe, it’s not fair.”

Tony scooped him out of the shield and stood up. Steve squirmed a little but gave up pretty quickly. 

“Big kitty,” Tony commented, beginning the walk back to the jet. Steve wasn’t too abnormally huge, by cat standards, as far as Tony knew, but he was nearly two of Clint, lanky and leggy and with what seemed like about a mile of tail. His fur was white all over except for the aforementioned “cowl” of orange that covered his ears and the top of his head down to his eyes, plus two large orange splotches on his back and an orange tail striped with white bands. 

Tony arranged a second storage bin with one of his spare shirts and one of Steve’s, for the sake of familiar scents, and regretfully left the second cat behind. 

Sam, who was now a grey-striped tabby, didn’t put up much of a fuss. After a moment of consideration and a careful, supervised period of sniffing to make sure they remembered each other, Tony put him in with Steve. Realizing about then how long this might take, Tony paused to add bowls of water to each improvised holding area. Clint tried to make a break for it, which wasted a little more time, but Tony prevailed in the end.

Thor.

Thor was definitely part mountain lion. Scruffy and yellow and huge and one-eyed and  _cranky_. Tony had to bundle him up in Steve’s jacket to get a safe grip on him, and still lost more than a few drops of blood in the process. Solitary confinement for that one.

Natasha took the longest, though, because if Nat didn’t want to be caught, you were not going to catch her. In the end it took Tony lying motionless on his back in the grass with her tac suit draped over him for almost ten minutes to lure the little tortoiseshell ragdoll out of hiding. 

She hopped up in the center of his chest and settled into a prim little loaf. He held very still for a few more minutes. Moved one hand up to rest next to her, fingertips tapping lightly on his collarbone. She studied them for a while. When she finally nuzzled against his hand for scritches, he gave them with a long, satisfied sigh. Nat’s trust was always hard-earned and never to be taken for granted. 

Once Nat had been brought back to the plane he gathered everyone’s scattered gear, his suit included, and took a hard-earned nap while FRIDAY flew them back. 

He woke to the disapproving face of Bucky Barnes leaning over him. Apparently the landing had been too smooth to wake him; or maybe he was just  _that_ tired.

Bucky raised an eyebrow at him. “Stark. Care to tell me why fifty pounds of kibble showed up here an hour before you did?”

****

“Rhodeybear! Oh thank god, here, take this one, get in here.”

Rhodey blinked at him a few times from the rec room doorway, before looking down at what had been shoved into his arms.

“Did...did you just give me a damp cat?”

“Yes, that’s Clintten, he knows what he did, just keep him contained for a second,” Tony waved vaguely toward the nearest sofa, already on his way to fetch a broom. 

The first twenty-fourish hours of Oh God Cats hadn’t gone too badly, mostly. Some minor property damage, and he’d gone through most of a box of Avengers-themed bandaids (thanks, Thor), but nothing that wouldn’t heal in a few days or cost more than fifty bucks to replace. Although they had quickly learned that the litter boxes Tony had ordered at first had not been meant for beasts of Steve and Thor’s caliber. After they’d had to hose down the common area bathroom exactly once, Bucky had silently hauled out an empty plastic twelve-gallon storage tub and dumped three bags of litter into it. 

“Tony.”

“Yes Buttercup?” Tony was mostly distracted by the shards of what had recently been a lamp.

“There’s a cat.”

“There’s five cats,” Tony corrected. He waved in the direction of the mantelpiece, where Thor was observing them all disdainfully. “Mind where you sit.”

Rhodey, halfway to seated on the couch, glanced down and changed course in a sudden lurch to avoid landing on Steve. Steve, unperturbed, climbed into Rhodey’s lap and made himself at home. 

“Tones. Why do you have five cats. Are they all named after your teammates? Does Steve know about this?” 

“Steve’s sitting on your lap.”

“The real Steve, Tones. Steve Rogers, big guy, blonde, takes you out dancing sometimes, I know you know who I mean.”

“That’s him,” Tony insisted, pointing with the dustpan. “Did I not brief you on this? I thought that’s why you were here.”

“I’m here for movie night, nobody tells me anything,” Rhodey complained, wide-eyed and absently scratching Clint’s ears. “Why is this one wet?”

“Oh. The brief is: magic sucks and I hate it. Clint is wet because he’s a hellion and until he quits destroying my furniture, he’s going to continue to get visits from the Spray Bottle Of Reprehension.” Tony emptied the dustpan into the trash with a bit more force than necessary and returned to flop down next to his friend. (The lamp had actually met its untimely end  _post_ -spritzing, the original punishment had been earned for certain tiny archers sharpening certain tiny claws on certain favorite armchairs.) “Yeah, so. You’ve got Clintten and Captain Americat there. Thor’s on the fireplace. He doesn’t get cute cat names because he is  _not_ a cute cat. Don’t pet him, he’ll eat you. Oh, and here comes Bucky with Catasha.”

“ _Koshkasha_ ,” Bucky corrected cheerfully. Tony wasn’t sure what that meant, but Bucky said it like it was in Russian. She was riding on his shoulder, as usual, as he passed them on the way to the kitchen.

The last cat had followed in on their heels, and immediately turned toward where Rhodey was sitting.

“And that one’s Garbage, we don’t talk to him,” Tony groused, stretching out an arm to try to block the grey tabby from jumping onto the sofa with them. “Go away, Garbage.”

“Who...?”

“It’s Sam,” Bucky chimed in helpfully, having returned with a sleeve of crackers in hand and leaning over the sofa behind them. “Tony’s mad at him.”

“He’s a  _homewrecker_ and he’s _not invited to sit with us_.”

Despite Tony’s best efforts, Sam managed to hop up on the far side of Rhodey, and immediately began grooming Steve’s ears with great enthusiasm. Steve, the traitor, let him.

“No. Mine. Not yours.” Tony scooped the orange-and-white cat off his friend’s lap and bundled him up in his arms. Sam climbed across Rhodey, determined in his mission. Tony jumped up and stood in the center of the room. 

“He’s not after your man, Stark,” Bucky laughed, clearly repeating himself from an earlier conversation.

“ _Then why is he trying to climb my leg?_ ”

“Ah, let them cuddle,” Bucky suggested with a grin. “We can blackmail them about it later.”

***

In some ways, Tony was going to miss having a whole clutter of cats around.

But this shit needed to  _end_.

Property damage, Thor-wounds, and Sam “Steal Yo Man” Wilson had only been the introductory course, as it happened.

Clint had already been enough of a menace vis-a-vis turning up in places he shouldn’t have been when he’d been people-sized. Now, no cabinet was safe. Tony had found him _inside a box of poptarts_ once. (Granted, they did tend to buy very large boxes of poptarts in this household.) 

Clint was the worst (always), but Steve was the kind of cat that would always be standing right where you were trying to put your foot, especially if you were carrying something heavy, expensive, or sticky, or if you were maybe on the phone and not actually paying attention and wearing hard-soled dress shoes in a room with polished-concrete floors (sorry Steve sorry sorry sorry). Sam, when not busy trying to steal anyone’s man, was that cat who would appear on any book, newspaper, or laptop keyboard within 0.2 seconds of anyone trying to use it. Thor, on several occasions, brought Tony what could best be described as  _portions_ of birds. Thor had not been allowed outside. Tony did not want to know how he got access to birds. (They had looked like wild birds, at least, and not likely to be pets that someone had unwisely left unattended during Catpocalypse.)

Natasha was mostly very well behaved and content to stick to Bucky like a four-legged cocklebur, but she had been involved in _that one incident_ , along with Clint. That one very very uncomfortable moment that Tony was trying very hard to forget. In which he had opted not to waste time debating the finer points of consent between persons under the influence of magic who may or may not be  able to communicate with each other right now and may or may not be in their right minds and may or may not have been invoking the name of Budapest as a thinly-veiled maybe-euphemism for years, and had instead emptied the entire Spray Bottle Of Reprehension over the scene and immediately gone in search of booze. 

But, at the same time, Tony had gotten a good giggle out of the poptart thing, once his heart had quit racing, and Steve refusing to leave his side could never be counted as a problem. Having such a big part of the team so helpless in his care was humbling, too, and it felt good to be able to take care of them, after all they’d been through. He could see it was good for Bucky, too. For all the progress the man had made, being able and allowed to  _protect_ someone still meant the world to him. Even if--especially if--he didn’t have to punch anybody’s brains out their ear to do it. 

Three days in, Tony was working at his desk in the main office. He’d elected to avoid the workshop--where things were pointy and/or on fire and/or went  _vroom_ with several thousand pounds of torque at a moment’s notice--until everyone had all their fingers and toes and IQ points back.

“Mrrrw?”

Unthinking, Tony answered the sound by letting one hand drape down beside his chair, still using the other to manipulate code. A tiny, wet nose brushed against his fingertips, followed by the long, soft drag of fur as Steve walked past his hand, repeatedly. 

Eventually, Tony noticed.

“Are, are you petting  _yourself_? Holy shit, I’m terrible, I’m the worst boyfriend, you shouldn’t have to resort to such desperate measures,” Tony lamented with a self-deprecating chuckle.

He shifted his chair back from the desk and Steve immediately vaulted up to his lap. None of the Catvengers were fond of being picked up, if they could help it, but they’d all proved to be inveterate lap-cats as long as it was their own choice. Tony shuffled around and got one foot up on the opposing knee, making a bigger lap. Steve was big enough that he’d fall off, otherwise. 

“How long do you think ‘a few days’ is in wizard-speak, huh?” Tony mused, rubbing his knuckles against both sides of Steve’s neck and receiving a thunderous purr as his only answer. “A few should be, what, between three and five, for normal people, right? You don’t think he’s one of those assholes who considers anything less than ten to be ‘a few,’ do you? I mean, more than five and less than ten has to be at least ‘several’. And it’s already been three, so we’ve got to be getting there, right?”

Steve turned his head and began licking Tony’s right hand, with great gusto.

“Oh, thank you, that’s very nice of you,” Tony had learned by now that trying to reclaim his fingers at this point would only net him a gentle but firm set of bitty pointy teeth latched onto his hand, which would not relent until he stopped trying to move away. “I  _am_ going to wash that hand after you’re done there, no offense, but I know where that tongue’s been--don’t give me that look, it’s not hypocritical, normally there’s a toothbrush involved afterward.”

“ _Tony_.”

Tony blinked down at the cat, brow furrowed. 

That had definitely been Steve’s voice. Steve’s oh-god-not-in-the-common-room-please-Bucky-is-looking-right-at-us voice. But the cat hadn’t moved. Hadn’t stopped licking, anyway.

“Steve?” he asked it, just to be sure. 

“Way more than I needed to know about my team leader, Stark,” and that one was Clint, that was 100% Clint, and Clint was supposed to be locked in the Bathroom of Shame for another three hours following what had happened to the bedspread in Wanda’s room. 

Holding perfectly still except for his feet, Tony rotated his chair 180 degrees to look out the office door. 

There in the hall, crowded around the doorway, were Steve, Clint, Natasha, Sam, and Thor. All looking distinctly bipedal and not at all feline. And, for some reason, dressed in scrubs.

“What.”

One of Strange’s arcane golden spinny-circles opened up in the air just inside the office, and Strange himself stepped through it, allowing it to vanish behind him.

“Tony,” he said by way of greeting, crossing his arms over his chest and making a face like a teacher who would like to have a conversation with your dog about its homework-heavy diet plan, or at least see photographic evidence that you actually own a dog.

“Stephen,” Tony answered carefully. 

“I have questions.”

“I...don’t think I have answers.”

***

Tony really, really hated magic.

Just when he was sure he knew what was happening in his life, he’d turn around and discover he’d accidentally adopted five tourist-tamed feral cats from the middle of nowhere, France. 

The group of rogue sorcerers they’d been fighting that day had set off the spell that caused Tony’s “purple-out” moment as a failsafe in case of compromised plans. That much was consistent with Tony’s understanding of what he’d seen. However, the effect of the spell had not been “turn all enemy combatants into cats, allowing us to flee,” as Strange rather sarcastically pointed out that Tony had assumed, but rather “transport everyone within a given radius to a safe location where we will have the upper hand.” 

While Tony had been playing Real Life Neko Atsume, his team had been held captive by literal dark wizards. 

He felt like an  _idiot_.

“I feel like an idiot,” he told Steve that night while they were brushing their teeth. 

Strange had stuck around long enough to explain how he’d tracked the enemy sorcerers to their base, been surprised to find their detention area full of undeniably human Avengers (also rather naked Avengers, mostly: the type of teleportation that had been used only worked organic matter by default, other objects had to be specially prepared in order to come along, hence the piles of empty clothing and gear left behind), and subsequently defeated all adversity through general superiority in every way yadda yadda Sorcerer SUPREME, yes Stephen, we’ve all heard your title, you can leave.

Bucky, after the initial shock, had immediately announced that he was keeping Koshkasha and if anybody wanted to say differently he’d meet them in the pit. 

“Aw, don’t be like that,” Steve hip checked Tony, gently, as he rinsed out his toothbrush. “I think it’s pretty funny, actually.”

“I  _abandoned_ you.”

“Not on purpose,” Steve pointed out, turning around to lean backwards against the counter. “And it wasn’t really that bad. They didn’t seem to have any clear plan of what to do with us, so mostly it was just kind of dull.”

“I jumped to the stupidest possible conclusion--” Tony jammed his toothbrush back into the holder, sending it rattling.

“Honey,” Steve wrapped a comforting hand around Tony’s bicep. “This life we lead, your incredulity meter gets turned down. It has to, or we can’t function. One time a tree introduced itself to me. Bucky believed the cats were us, and so did Rhodey. So did Stephen, until he saw differently. And Tony?” Steve moved him until they were facing each other, both hands now resting on Tony’s shoulders. “If Stephen believed you? That means it was  _actually a real thing that magic can do_ and a _completely possible outcome_ to the situation he’d sent us into _._ ”

Tony blinked. “Well, shit.”

“We don’t get the luxury of shrugging things off because they’re ‘impossible’ around here,” Steve went on with a smile. “You saw something impossible, took it in stride, and did everything you could to help your friends. That’s not stupid,” Steve leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on Tony’s forehead. “That’s my Tony.”

Unable to respond to that, Tony allowed himself to be led out of the bathroom and tucked into bed. The perfectly-round puddle of fur he’d been sharing his pillow with for the last few nights had been fun, but it didn’t compare to having a whole entire supersoldier draped over him like a two hundred pound sack of potatoes. Heavy, sure, and more than a bit unyielding, but it was Tony’s favorite way to wake up, bar none.

Still.

“Hey, Steve?”

“Mmm.”

“...Bucky got to keep his cat.”

Steve took a few seconds to process that, in his half-asleep state. “Are you asking for permission to keep the Steve cat?”

“I mean, I’m not sending them back out into the wild either way. Worst case scenario I’m getting them all fixed and vaccinated and finding them homes. Nice homes. Nice homes with nice people. Maybe people who speak French, so they’ll fit in. The Thor one might have to go to the zoo, though, we’ll see about--”

“Tony.”

“What?”

Steve grinned, which Tony couldn’t see, but he could feel it where Steve’s face was pressed against his neck. “Just name him something else, okay? I already have enough trouble with you-no-not-you-Steve-U-the-robot-you. There’s only room for one Steve in this house.”

Tony laughed. “You got it, Cap.”


End file.
